Frederic Baraga Biography

Slovenian-American Bishop Frederic Baraga (1797–1868) spent
much of his career as a Roman Catholic priest and missionary to Native
American populations in the Upper Midwest and Canada. He baptized
thousands of new converts to Christianity, but appreciated the
traditions and customs of the Ojibwa and their cousins, the Ottawa
Indians, and knew that much of their culture had likely been lost
forever after contact with European settlers. Dubbed the
"Snowshoe Priest" during his lifetime because he favored
the indigenous footwear when traveling the long distances between
communities, Baraga was a gifted linguist who compiled the first-ever
Ojibway-English dictionary.

The future bishop was born June 29, 1797, as Irenej Friderik Baraga in the
town of Dobrnič, Slovenia. At the time, this part of
Slovenia—later one of the Yugoslavian federal republics—was
known as the Austrian Dukedom of Carniola, and was part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Baraga was born at a castle called
Mala vas
, where his father, Johann Nepomuc Baraga, worked as an overseer.
Baraga's family was not titled, but they were

relatively affluent and could afford to send him away to school. His
mother, Maria Katharin Josefa Jenčič Baraga, died in 1808,
when Baraga was nine years old. That same year he was sent to
Slovenia's largest urban center, Llubljana, to live and study at
the home of a private tutor. The city was known by its German name,
Laibach, at the time.

Became Fluent in Several Languages

Slovenia's strategic position between the Mediterranean and the
Alps occasionally stirred geopolitical rivals, and turmoil flared up
during Baraga's youth. Lower Carniola was occupied by French troops
the year Baraga was born, and again in 1805 and 1806. In 1809 they
reverted once more to French control when the area became part of the
Illyrian Provinces of France. Because of this, Baraga learned both German
and French as well as Slovenian during his youth. He entered
Laibach's gymnasium—a school that offered a college
preparatory curriculum—in 1809, and went on to the University of
Vienna, from which he received his law degree in 1821.

Baraga had been raised in the Roman Catholic faith, and came to know a
famous and influential cleric during his years in Vienna, Clemens Maria
Hofbauer (1751–1820). Revered posthumously as the patron saint of
Vienna, Hofbauer was known for his challenges to the Emperor, who oversaw
the Church in Austria, and influenced Baraga's decision to forego a
career in law and train for the priesthood instead. Breaking off an
engagement to the daughter of a professor, he entered the seminary in
Laibach in 1821. Ordained on September 21, 1823, he served in several
parishes in Slovenia for the next seven years, until he heard about a new
group in Vienna that was searching for priests willing to venture into the
North American wilderness to convert the Native Americans there to
Christianity.

The Leopoldine Society, as it was called, raised money to establish
parishes in the remoter parts of the United States and Canada, and Baraga
became the first missionary it sent over. The journey took two months, and
Baraga arrived in Cincinnati, Ohio—the Leopoldine Society
headquarters in America—in mid-January of 1831. He began studying
the language of the Ottawa, which was called Anishinaabe in their own
tongue, in preparation for his first assignment. He was aided by an innate
gift for languages, having already become fluent in German, French, Latin,
Italian, and English, as well as his own Slovenian.

The Ottawa language that Baraga took up was part of the Algonquian family
of Native American tongues. The Ottawa were traders, and related to the
larger ethnic group of Ojibwa, who were sometimes called Chippewa. Ottawa
communities dotted the shores of Lake Huron in both present-day Michigan
and Ontario, but they had also settled further west in the Grand Traverse
Bay area on Lake Michigan, and it was here that Baraga was first sent. In
May of 1831 he arrived in Arbre Croche, an Ottawa village that much later
became part of Harbor Springs, a Michigan resort community. He found about
650 residents there, and had great success in urging them to formally
adopt Christianity, reportedly converting 547 of them.

Authored First Ottawa Text

Baraga realized that simple texts with the Roman Catholic
catechism—a question-and-answer form of instruction in the beliefs
of the faith—and prayer books in their native language would help
him better explain the Christian principles to his potential converts, and
guide the recently baptized in their new form of religious worship. He
authored a combination of the two forms, using the Ottawa terms he had
learned, and had it printed in 1832 with the title
Otawa Anamie-Misinaigan
. This became the first book ever published in the Ottawa language.

In 1833 Baraga was sent to start a second mission at Grand River, a
community that later grew into the city of Grand Rapids, but encountered
problems when he voiced concern about the liquor that fur traders were
exchanging with Native Americans, which he felt was ruinous to the health
of the community. In the summer of 1835 he moved much further north, this
time to La Pointe, an outpost of the American Fur Company in the
northernmost part of Wisconsin, on Lake Superior. The settlement included
the nearby Apostle Islands, one of which was home to a trading post dating
back to 1693. The village was populated by retired traders for the
American Fur Company—the immensely successful venture founded by
John Jacob Astor in 1808—as well as by the indigenous Ojibwa; there
were also many Métis, a mixed-race group that were the product of
intermarriage between French-Canadian or British traders and Native
American women.

Baraga arrived in this area—a vast, frigid land mass that included
Michigan's Upper Peninsula, was sparsely populated, heavily
forested, and known mainly for the harshness of its long winter—at
a time when there were almost no missionaries in the region, nor had there
ever been. He set to work learning the Ojibwa language and proselytizing
to both indigenous and Métis. The Ojibwa—or Aanishanabe as
they called themselves in their own language—were the largest
population group of Native Americans after the Cherokee and Navajo in the
continental United States. In his eight years at La Pointe, Baraga
baptized nearly a thousand Native Americans and whites, and authored his
first text in the Ojibwa language, a sermon book tilted
Gagikwe-Masiniagan
.

Achieved Fame as "Snowshoe Priest"

Once Baraga had established a successful mission, he usually left it in
the care of another priest and moved on to start another one. In 1843 he
arrived in L'Anse, on the shores of Lake Superior at the base of
the Keweenaw Peninsula in the Upper Peninsula. The entire region was now a
boom town, thanks to newly discovered copper and iron deposits in the
Upper Peninsula; new European immigrants with mining backgrounds began
flooding in. Baraga found himself the steward of a rapidly growing Roman
Catholic population as well as the unofficial one for the Protestant
settlers. In 1848 church authorities elevated him to the rank of vicar
general; five years later he was consecrated bishop of Amyzonia, which was
the original term for the diocese of Upper Michigan, later called the
diocese of Marquette. Its seat was originally in Sault Ste. Marie.
Furthermore, the bishop of Toronto put Baraga in charge of missions
located on the north shore of Lake Superior from Bruce Mines to Thunder
Bay, and a few even further north, such as one at Lake Nipigon.

In all, Baraga oversaw an 80,000-square mile territory of land and water,
and became increasingly devoted to his vocation as he grew older. He
traveled hundreds of miles every year in order to carry out his work, and
used the Ojibwa modes of transportation—a canoe in the warmer
months, and snowshoes for winter travel. In one letter, he wrote that he
planned to visit La Pointe and L'Anse and then go on to Fond du
Lac, Wisconsin, a journey of some 690 miles that he would make on foot.
"When a person must walk upon such snowshoes all day long and for
that many days in succession, especially in those trackless forests, he
cannot travel without extreme fatigue and almost total exhaustion,"
he admitted in the letter, according to an article in the Minneapolis
Star Tribune
by Larry Oakes. He also rose at 3 or 4 a.m. daily in order to devote
three hours of his morning to prayer.

Baraga became famous throughout northern Michigan and neighboring areas as
the beloved "Snowshoe Priest," and even enjoyed some
eminence in Europe, thanks to his writings about his work with the Ojibwa.
He was respected by native groups as well as Protestant newcomers to the
region, and venerated by his Roman Catholic congregation as an exemplar of
Christ's teachings in practice. During the worst months of winter,
Baraga remained inside—his permanent home was in
L'Anse—and studied the Ojibwa language. He authored two
significant works on this Anishinaabe dialect, which was widely spoken in
the Upper Peninsula, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The first,
Theoretical and Practical Grammar of the Otchipwe Language
, was published in Detroit in 1850. His
Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language
, published in Cincinnati in 1853, remained in print for decades to come,
and provided an invaluable tool for the priests and other settlers who
ventured into the region.

First Bishop of Marquette

In 1865 Baraga moved to Marquette, Michigan, when this city near the shore
of Lake Superior was named the new seat of the Upper Michigan diocese. A
church commensurate with this status was built, and in 1866 the Cathedral
of St. Peter was dedicated by Baraga during a Mass. Later that year,
however, Baraga suffered a stroke in Baltimore during an important
conference of American bishops; he reportedly begged his aide to help him
on the train before his fellow clerics realized his condition and
prevented him from returning to what had become his home. Over the next
two years, Baraga's health declined further, and he died in
Marquette on January 19, 1868. He was buried 11 days later in the
Cathedral of St. Peter crypt, a day on which not even a blizzard snowstorm
prevented hundreds of mourners from paying their respects.

The Cathedral of St. Peter sits on Baraga Street in Marquette, and there
is also a Michigan county—which includes L'Anse, the site of
his fourth mission—and village named in his honor. Devoted
followers formed a society to honor him, the Bishop Baraga Association.
More than a century after his death, the Association presented reams of
research and testimony to an official church committee in Marquette in
1972. This hearing was the first step in the process toward Roman Catholic
sainthood. Following this, the Vatican officially deemed Baraga a
"Servant of God," a designation that is the first step on
the path to sainthood. One younger priest, inspired by Baraga's
stories of missionary work in America, was Father John Neumann
(1811–1860), who later became bishop of Philadelphia and one of the
first men and women to be elevated to sainthood for their religious work
in America.